


Small Things

by scarredsodeep



Category: AFI
Genre: Eating Disorders, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Femslash, Genderbending, I'm inventing a new genre called oral sex & sadness, Lady Javeys, Mental Health Issues, Personal Growth, Post-Break Up, Tales from 2009, crash love era, self-harm mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-27 03:31:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9950891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: Davey's got two problems: she can't stop sleeping with Jade, even though they broke up three years ago, and no matter how hard she tries, she can't quite stop eating. She doesn't know how to solve either.Crash Love-era genderbend Javey with sex, sadness, and disordered eating.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a weird one. It was a lot of work to write, and I'm proud of myself. I don't know if anyone will read it but if you are here, hello, I'm glad to see you, and I hope this story has something to offer you.
> 
> Consider this a HUGE, GIANT, FLASHING trigger warning. This is a story that either uses an eating disorder as a vehicle to work through a break-up or a break-up as a vehicle to make sense of an eating disorder. I wrote this from the depths of my own eating issues and, as a result, it might not be easy to read.

_ The rhythms of your life will change: your heartbeat, your hormones, your thoughts. Your brain will switch to a new energy source, something rare and wonderful, something only humans do and a few lactating ungulates. You will start consuming yourself, but precisely, carefully, with such orchestration. _

_-Sharman Apt Russell_

 

I.

Davey’s life these days is a study in small things. Small looks, small touches, small meals, small moments. Small memories. Small waists, small wristbones.

There has been a kind of narrowing: she knows that once, somehow, she cared about larger things, could hold more in her gaze than these scarce, splintery obsessions, could expand to contain much more inside herself. There has been a lessening too, whereby great swaths of life and time that once beat vibrant, shone remarkably, have diminished. Have turned back into paltry handfuls of too-few years. It is hard to remember how they ever felt like _so much_. Davey used to contain multitudes, used to burst and burn with potential. There used to be so much more space within her.

The emptier she gets, the more whole she feels. It’s like a riddle.

Well, she always fancied herself clever and oblique: gather round and watch the poet-contortionist tie herself in knots.

She’s not exactly sure when she stopped eating normally. It wasn’t ground that gave all at once—it was erosion, glacially slow, tectonic. The plates that compose her have shifted. Now food is… numbers, a calculus of self-loathing, an obsession you torture yourself with not because you want to but because you don’t remember how to stop. Food is failure. Food is weakness. Food is all she thinks about.

Every time she sits, she feels the fat at her low ribs and hips pinch sickeningly, fold. She clenches her flabby stomach skin in her fist under the table and thinks wildly, a panicked animal, of slicing it off. Wouldn’t scars be better? Every time she catches a glimpse of her own reflection, she’s paralyzed with horror, fascination, disgust. She’s always _measuring_ , outlining and sizing every body she sees, telling herself, _you’re fatter than that; your arms will never be that skinny; you’re so much lumpier than her; you’re bigger, you’re disgusting, you’re fat fat fattest_. Hundreds of times a day, she awards herself these punishing superlatives. Almost below the level of her consciousness now, automatically, she says to herself, _You’re fat and disgusting and you deserve to die_.

So no. She doesn’t know when it started. She doesn’t remember _deciding_ to start any of this. Who would?

She doesn’t see any way back out, either.

Not that she’d take it. It’s not that she’d rather be dead than be fat. It’s that for her, there is no longer any difference. Her body is too _big_ , always awkward and ogre-ish, bulging over waistbands. She just wants—she just wants the first thing people notice about her to be that she’s _thin_. She just wants enough self-control to accomplish this one fucking starving _thing_. That is not asking too much. It’s not.

Jade tucks a long strand of her bangs behind her ear, a futile habit that has failed the last 463 times and will foreseeably fail this time too.

She’s watching Davey eat. More specifically, she’s watching Davey _not_ eat. Davey is slowly dissembling her blueberry muffin into a pile of constituent crumbs, trying to convince herself she doesn’t want it. Once she lets herself taste it, she’ll have lost. The problem is not food. Food is not disgusting; _she_ is. Davey never should have agreed to meet Jade somewhere that served 500 calorie muffins.

At tables all around them, people eat muffins normally, sloppily, quickly, carelessly. Davey’s gut sours with nausea and envy and some third thing that only a weak person would call _hunger_.

God, Davey feels good when she’s hungry. Measuring mouthfuls, stretching out the space between—it’s one damn thing she can control, anyway. Right now, for example, she’d like to scald her mouth with her coffee, burn out the weakness, the muffin-attuned salivary glands. Davey knows a cup of black coffee only has 6 calories but even so, she wants to see how long she can wait. Just craving the burn of it against her skin, the taste of it, is a kind of weakness.

The thing about resisting. About putting off the first sip as long as you can. You can only win this game until you _do_ take a sip or a bite, commit your act of consumption, and spoil it. After that it’s all just loss.

Davey’s fingertips shine slickly with oil from the muffin, like Morgan le Fey fat and slippery on her bed of butter. Davey wipes her fingers carefully, one by one, a napkin, suddenly worried the fat will somehow be absorbed through her skin. Her fingertips smell indelibly of blueberry now. A pleasant nervy warmth contracts suddenly between her legs, unbidden, as she remembers her fingertips smelling like Jade instead—as she imagines the _taste_ of Jade all mixed up with the crystal-sugar sweetness of her crumbled blueberry muffin. Davey feels her cheeks prickle and heat with blood at the memory-turned-fantasy. At the _wish_ of it, the power of her own wanting. Is she such an ascetic, now, that any pleasure is a weakness? Or is Jade something she can allow herself to indulge in, because Jade is pleasure and suffering too?

Davey picks at the chipped polish on her thumbnail, flaking chunks of gold glitter into the ruins of the muffin, concentrating hard on how repulsive she finds this. “How’s Marissa?” she asks, not quite able to stop herself.

To Jade’s credit, she only flinches a little. She takes a calm sip of her coffee, catching and holding Davey’s eyes as she does so. Davey always forgets how steady her clear amber gaze is—how _unimpressed_ she is by Davey’s bluster and bullshit. She always forgets how irritatingly _brave_ Jade can be, just when Davey starts taking for granted all the ways she’s a coward.

“She’s… young,” Jade says, shrugging one thin shoulder. Her bangs are already back in her eyes. “I don’t know. She’s not you.”

Davey waits, anticipating a barb. But Jade’s tone is honest, unadorned. Maybe she’s just… run out of venom. Maybe she’s already spit so much of it her wounds have been burned shut, clean and cauterized.

This is the opposite of how Davey feels. “Wow,” she says with poisonous levity, “I’m surprised you’re not saying it.”

“Saying what?”

“Whatever comment about my ‘ten thousand lovers’ I know you’ve got in the chamber.”

Jade’s teeth flash as she’s surprised into a real grin. She covers her smile with her lips again just as quick, a self-conscious habit Davey wants to try all over again to kiss her out of. It is fucking ridiculous that Davey should still want her so much. Should still, after everything, love her so much.

“Well, I’m trying very hard not to,” says Jade, still smiling.

“I can see that.” Davey’s caught up in her good humor, as she so often is. This whole conversation, tried and tired, is so well-rehearsed as to become… playful. They know the script so well they’ve started to have fun with it.

They’ve had to find a way to survive each other. To survive the fallout. Davey thinks it would be easier sometimes, if they weren’t friends. But if there’s something Davey won’t forgive her, Jade hasn’t thought of it yet. Somehow, Davey likes it this way. Dark, sometimes bitter, tender in its unhappiness. They have as many sweet moments apart as they ever did together—more, maybe, depending on the balance of the hourglass, the fulcrum and dividing line of time.

Also, the sex is just as good.

So they play-fight in a vegan bakery. It might be a preamble to writing, to real fighting, to fucking—it doesn’t matter which. Jade consumes her almost equally to the reverent, ritual act of not consuming. This is the narrowing: Davey is obsessed with being less and having more. If Jade still wants her. If she can weigh in at just one pound less, every time they meet. Then this will be one thing she has. Wants. _Needs_.

The only thing she needs.

(If she can find just _one_ more new lover. If she can run just _one_ more mile than last week. If she can eat just _one_ bite less. It’s the same bargain, the same logic. It will not end until she’s dwindled down to nothing. Until she’s cancelled herself out.)

Jade watches her pick at the muffin and Davey can almost read her mind, because of course they’ve had this fight before too. Every time Jade says _you know I think you’re beautiful_ , Davey hears the one time she said _I would take a bullet for your Italian hips and ass, save them at all costs_ , holding Davey by her thick, unbearably squishy hips. Every time Jade says _you’re looking thin, Dave_ , Davey hears the Thanksgiving her mom put on a VHS of the high school musical she starred in and said, looking at actual _footage_ of Davey at 15, at actual Bigfoot-exists-level documentation, _now I don’t remember you_ ever _being that thin. You were always heavier than that._ Every time Jade says _should I be worried about you_ , it feels like Davey has scored a point in some kind of game she didn’t even know she was playing.

Well. She knows she’s playing now, at least.

Jade parts her pretty lips and says, “I’d feel better if you ate something.”

Davey uses her best velvet voice in her reply. “I’d eat _you_.”

Jade’s face is a brief war between concern and longing. It folds fast into a helpless grin. They go back to Jade and Marissa’s apartment, leaving the muffin behind, and devour each other.

 

After, they are sprawled breathless and thoroughly sated across the bed Jade usually shares with Marissa. Davey can feel Jade’s eyes resting too long on her body, something soft in her eyes now that the hunger has worn off, and Davey doesn’t like it. She keeps twitching the sheet over herself, concealing one scar, concavity, imperfection or another. It’s nothing Jade hasn’t seen before, none of it is, but Davey’s worried about that look. It’s hard to believe, coming from her, but truly: today she doesn’t want to fight.

“Let me look at you,” Jade murmurs, slipping the sheet off the hip Davey just covered. As Jade bends over Davey’s hip to bite it, Davey catches a flash of her frown through her long bangs, brown now where once she wore patches of blond. She’s had that same stupid haircut forever, Davey thinks, trying to charge up some annoyance. Davey tugs a hand through her own shorn hair, a short pushed-back style with her own streaks of bleach in it. She squirms away.

Jade catches one of Davey’s wrists, frowning again at the way her fingertips overlap on either side of it. “You have monstrous guitarist hands,” Davey reminds her. “They’ve always been huge on me. Don’t say it.”

Jade bites her lip, looking at Davey with pain across her face. “I just,” she starts. She stops herself. “I wish.” She stops again.

Sometimes, as soon as Davey eats, all the good is gone. She eats something she’s been longing for, turning over and over in her mind for days, only to find she doesn’t _want_ the food anymore—she feels horrid instead, unbearably _filled_ and itchy with vulnerability, like she could vomit up all her insides and still be bloated. Like she wants to die instead. Fucking Jade is a little like that, too, sometimes. Now that she’s let herself have it, it’s ruined.

“Just—stop looking at me, okay? I feel gross. I’m gonna use your shower.” Davey slides out of the bed and hurries into the bathroom, regretting her nakedness. At once mortified that Jade should see her fat, jiggling ass and, with a different part of her brain, that Jade should see the knobby protrusions of her spine, the new shadows cast by her ribs. The feeling of pride that she can sometimes briefly hold, after they’ve slept together, after someone’s seen her shrinking body, is already gone. This is the lessening.

In the shower, Davey finds herself staring down at her body, thick and puffy and pale as a corpse fished out of a river, and thinking about how _thin_ Marissa is. Marissa, who has only just turned 22 (making her _twelve years younger than Davey no she has not forgotten how could she ever forget thank you very much_ ), is literally a model. Jade’s new girlfriend, Jade’s new _much younger_ girlfriend, is so pretty that she makes her _living_ just by going around and being pretty. She is cream-golden and looks like heaven must feel. She is impeccably thin and always perfectly dressed, her ridiculous blond curls spilling everywhere. She is immaculate. She is at least fourteen thousand times more feminine than Davey ever was, even when she had long hair and wore long dresses.

What Davey thinks about Marissa is this: if you were to look for a person who was the exact opposite of Davey, kind, happy, glowing blond Marissa is who you would choose. Her lips and cheeks are rose-porcelain and you can tell just by looking that nothing has ever been hard for her. That’s she never felt sadness or gotten the flu or even burped in her entire life.

What Davey thinks about Marissa is this: Jade must really, _really_ have not wanted Davey anymore. If Marissa is who she went out and picked.

What Davey thinks about Marissa is this: if Davey were that thin, maybe Jade never would have gone looking for a Marissa in the first place.

The water burns into Davey’s back, runs in rivulets down her disappointing body. It’s never enough. She’s never enough. Five minutes after fucking Jade in Marissa’s own bed, all of the pain has rushed back in as if it never left. Davey closes fists and fingernails around the saggy love handles that bubble and bulge above her hips. She imagines how satisfying it would be to tear them off, to just fucking _rip_ _herself apart_ , here in Jade’s shower.

Marissa and Jade are both so thin, it’s a miracle they don’t leave bruises on each other when they fuck. If they could have biological children, they’d be so small they’d have fairy tales written about them, little Thumbelinas each. If Jade and Marissa had children, Davey doesn’t know _what_ she’d have to do to express her grief and outrage. Cut her own arms off, probably. She’s running out of ways to escalate the physical manifestations of internal misery.

Without noticing it, Davey has started to cry. “You dumb fucking bitch,” Davey says softly to herself in the shower, turning to face the spray. “Pull yourself the fuck together. How _dare_ you.” Soon, her tears are lost, drowned invisible by all the other water.

 

Davey’s hoping she can slip out unnoticed after the shower. She bundles herself back into her baggy clothes, specifically chosen to disguise the offending body from Jade’s eyes. In retrospect, that was a wasted effort, since she apparently planned on stripping down for her anyway. They had planned to write today, to work on the new album, but Davey feels hollowed out, used up. There’s nothing good left in her today. If they try to work, it will only get ugly.

Jade is lying in wait for her, though: sitting on a slender modern barstool in her slender modern kitchen. Davey hates everything about this apartment. Like Marissa, it is just about the perfect opposite of anyplace they’d ever lived together.

A bowl of ludicrous California fruit is at Jade’s elbow, so fresh and vibrant that it approaches the vulgar. A loaf of Italian bread sits casually at the other end of the counter. Davey feels assaulted: food on every surface, everywhere she looks. How do these women stay so thin when they have so much _food_?

Jade is picking at a pear, spinning it in wobbling circles on the counter in front of her. She does not look like she intends to eat it, one small mercy—just with her lovely hands on it, Davey’s thinking of how the pear juice would taste, licked sticky and sweet off Jade’s lips.

“Hey. Could we… sit a minute?” Jade asks. She sounds so awkward, uncertain. Davey hates it when Jade is like this with her. Davey was always the exception to Jade’s shyness. It always felt like it _meant_ something, that Jade was tongue-tied and quiet with everyone but Davey. Like they were a club of two, a secretly shared soul.

It’s not like that now. As if to prove it, Jade nudges the edge of the fruit bowl and says, “Want a pear?”

Davey was not ever really considering sitting, but that confirms it. She slumps back against the nearest wall instead, crossing her arms over her chest. She knows she’s being petulant as hell but she’s not interested in stopping. “ _No_ ,” she says, shaping the syllable with total disdain. It should be obvious to anyone who’s just seen her corpulent nudity that she does not want a _pear_.

“Didn’t think so,” Jade says, her bow mouth quirking to the side in a manner Davey does not care to interpret. She lets out a sigh, like Davey is just _so_ exhausting. _Well, fuck you too Jade, you tire the_ fuck _out of me_ , Davey thinks. As quick as the anger flares, though, it dies. Jade really does tire her out. It’s hard to sustain any kind of emotion after being around her for a while.

Jade squeezes her forehead in one hand, shutting her eyes, and then looks up and pins Davey to the wall with her amber gaze. “Okay. I just… What do you _want_ , Vee?”

Davey feels on the point of collapse. She is scraped dry, like a bone pulled out of the desert after one hundred years. All she wants is for this conversation to be over, to leave this beautiful home full of things that don’t belong to her and stab out her eyes so she never has to look at Jade again. She is so exhausted that she tells the truth:

“I want to rub salt in the wound of you to keep it from ever closing.”

“So… you’re not trying to get back together, then.” Jade’s still fixing her with that stare. Davey tips her head back, showing Jade the soft weakness of her throat and studying the ceiling to avoid her gaze. Davey doesn’t know how else to say _I surrender_.

“I’m just trying to survive, J.” Survive the loss of her. Survive this album. Survive herself.

“It doesn’t look like that’s what you’re doing.” Jade’s voice is so soft, so filled with resignation, that they both know she already knows how Davey’s going to react. It’s how Davey always reacts, when people make comments about her _fucking_ eating: by trying to hurt them back.

“Should we talk about what _you’re_ doing, Jade?” Davey’s voice comes out in a hiss, her eyes sweeping a stinging line from the ceiling to Jade’s face. There’s a stir of warmth, not quite enough to shake the chill from her fingertips or blue bones. It’s not the usual cobra-strike of anger; it’s less than she expects. She feels grimly proud of the physical weakness and the accomplishment it signifies. “Screwing me in your girlfriend’s bed? Again? What do _you_ want, exactly?”

Jade gets to her feet abruptly. Her long, lean body vibrates with tension, manifesting in clenched fists and rigid jaw. “Fucking forget it,” she spits. “I don’t know why I even bother.”

“Don’t, then!”

“Fine!”

They stand in front of each other in silence, shaking. Then the thread of tension between them snaps: Jade closes the distance in two long-legged steps, takes Davey’s sharp chin in the bowl of her hands, and kisses her with all the fury fanned by their fight. Davey is so tired she could sink into the kiss, melt away in this moment, float out to sea under the soft attention of Jade’s lips and hands.

Davey is so tired she can’t think of a damned reason not to.

Davey is so tired she kisses Jade back, and slips away.

 

II.

Davey takes meals like this:

First, she likes to wait as long as she possibly can. She waits for the edges of the world to fuzz out into a white blur, for shadows to burst across her vision when she turns her head, for reality to lag behind so she’s suspended in a perfect second of soft grey, the feeling of a sweet skipped heartbeat, a breath of oblivion—a pure moment of nothing, of the void. Davey likes to pass through this space at least once before she concedes to a meal. Look at her fucking hips—her body has _plenty_ to eat. Consuming extra is just self-indulgence.

When she fails—and she is weak, disgusting, so she fails often—she has to undo it. She has to burn it out of herself. That’s what the treadmill is for. That’s why she’s laid her footprints across all the streets of Oakland, hammering mile upon mile of punishment into her greedy bones.

Davey measures out this meal with precision. There is much to feel proud of today: she’s been awake seven hours without taking in any more than a mug of coffee, she’s scoured her entire kitchen with enough bleach to totally dissolve any food crumbs her sponge missed, and this morning she made it through her cardio routine twice without any of the 30 second rest periods. She counts out six pecans, 8oz of coconut water, and one clementine orange. Her hand hovers a moment over the rice cakes. She was good today; she can have one. But the thought tickles in her brain: _resist this, and run at a loss._ This is what Jade, willowy like a yoga instructor, cannot possibly understand: the allure of running at a deficit, burning out and not replacing. Maybe one day, Davey will subsist on sips of air and dew alone. Until then, stopping herself from eating a rice cake is the closest she can get to sublimation. It is a pleasure, a pride, she has never been able to properly explain.

Well. There is no one here, anymore, to ask her for explanations.

She used to think the only reason she didn’t have an eating disorder was because Jade’s worried amber eyes were always on her. She used to resent this, to romanticize isolation: if she lived alone, she could eat-or-not as she chose, and no one would ever ask her why, would ever worry. Well, she lives alone now, with one here to count or care, and she knows _she’s_ the only real reason she doesn’t have an eating disorder. She’s an undisciplined cow. This is what eating six pecans and one clementine orange cannot prepare her for: the failure that will come later, the sudden wild collapse of starvation-eroded willpower. She will be halfway through a pint of almond milk Ben  & Jerry’s when the misery will hit, the self-loathing crashing over her in drowning waves, and she will hate herself so much she will keep eating.

She doesn’t hate herself enough to starve. She hates herself too much to stop eating.

This is the trap.

She can no longer even imagine finding a way out of it.

 

Davey thinks she’ll be happy when her period stops. The inverse is certainly true: every month when it comes, it confirms what a fat failure she is. She gets angry, bloated, and depressed, stands in from of her full-length mirror, and prods her glutted abdomen with violent hate. Is it so crazy to expect an equal and opposite reaction, the month it finally doesn’t come?

But there is no fanfare. Amenorrhea is an accomplishment that steals in quietly, pallid and funerary, a badge that designates her one step further out of life, one step closer to the undisturbed grey of death. It is another accomplishment she has no one to celebrate with. They do not make greeting cards that say, _congratulations on your little annihilation._

The lack of blood in her panties is just another absence, another emptiness. Davey devours the void. She consumes nothingness and is never satisfied. When her womb turns into a black hole too, she feels proud, for a moment, just as she feels pride for every denial, every emptiness. And just like all the others, this pride too is swallowed not moments after it arrives. (She’s just that hungry.)

It’s swallowed by her next meal, by the next time she stands before a mirror, by Marissa’s next post on Instagram, by any number of those small things that, like dusty moths alighting, disrupt her precarious balance.

Davey loathes being so fragile.

She believes hunger will make her stronger. She believes that if she can strip herself down to just the skeleton, the raw architecture, her softness will be gone. A fortress will remain.

If there is a flaw in this logic, she’s too exhausted to see it. So she just keeps opening her mouth, swallowing nothing.

 

Jade comes over to write. Pretense or not, this is unusual. For reasons she can’t articulate, Davey doesn’t like having Jade in her house anymore. It makes her feel skittish, feral—a wild animal, mistrustful of being observed.

They sit careful on Davey’s faux leather couch, which looked nice in the catalogue but Davey has grown to resent. It sticks to her skin, its wrinkled lumpy excess drawing unflattering comparisons to Davey’s spreading, cellulite thighs. Davey perches on the cushion’s very edge, keeping her legs off the grotesque thing so it can’t embarrass her in front of Jade. Sitting like she’s prepared for flight is not comfortable, not casual. Before long her legs shake with the strain. With exquisite self-control and every abdominal muscle clenched, she holds her distance. Will thin as tinfoil, she resists Jade’s gravitational pull.

In direct opposition to Davey’s contortionist act of immaculate self-denial, Jade sinks into the fleshy pink depths of the couch with abandon, her legs splayed immodestly, her black skirt hiked above her knobby knees.

Davey stares at those knees with competing tenderness and envy. The blend is nauseating. There is a nick on Jade’s left knee where she is prone to cut herself shaving; Davey, knowing the spot well, wants to bury it with her lips, smooth the wound shut.

So much of what she wants to do to Jade, what she wants from Jade, is smoothing wounds shut. The rest of what she wants is tearing wounds open.

Davey can never tell if she’s angry or happy or neutral, these days. It all feels brittle. It all feels bright.

It is the thinnest and sharpest time in her life.

Jade’s laptop is balanced on her belly, as if on Jade, the stomach is a body part and not a battleground. Davey sucks her own stomach towards her spine, hating the way her knit tunic doesn’t even shift. She sucks her breath in harder, trying to disappear. The insolent meat of her pooching organs refuses to flatten within her gut. She rejects the tenet that she cannot get thinner than this. She just needs to try harder.

Davey wouldn’t have any problems, if she could just fucking _try_ hard enough.

A tinny melody spools out from Jade’s laptop. Davey imagines the sound spilling from her womb, Jade gestating electronica, birthing atmospheric lead-ins, nursing powerhouse riffs and gutting solos. Davey feels her like a heartbeat, all threaded through every song she’s ever written. Even when Davey’s never heard them before, Jade’s songs sound like coming home.

Davey wants to touch her. No, Davey wants to be her. Davey wants to slip inside her, to sink into her bones, to hide there within her beautiful skin until Davey becomes contained and explained in music too: simplified and storied, stretched out weightless in resolving notes that make _sense_ of her. That make her okay again. That make her whole.

_No_. Davey wants to nuke what she loves from space because she’s afraid it will make her soft.

Fucking, fighting, or fleeing: these are the only ways she can even begin to cope with Jade. With all the fucking things waking up inside her, with all the things Jade is making her feel. Davey has silenced those things a thousand times, starved and suffocated and stripped them down to nothing. But Jade comes into her home, stirs up _life_. Bringing breath to things long-dead, filling the air with hope and heartbeats.

It’s too much. Davey is not enough. Jade makes her want to live again. Jade makes her _hungry_. She can’t fucking stand the feeling of hope rubbing against her skin. She has to fucking smash it.

“What do you think?” Jade asks after a taut few moments of trotting out different snippets of melody. “Anything sound good yet?”

The melodies don’t sound anything like their band. Not in the way of musical evolution but in the way something isn’t itself anymore, if you scrape its whole inside and all its organs out, if you render it fucking hollow. (That’s the idea, anyway. That it won’t be itself. That she won’t be.) The melodies sound very specifically unlike the last albums. The albums that made their wildest dreams come true, the ones they wrote in love, together. The lack of similarity is so precise it evokes the scalpel.

It is so stupid and so futile, sitting on the couch like this, a polite distance apart. It is so stupid pretending anything is going to happen but what’s going to happen. Even when they aren’t writing in bed, they end up in bed. At this point, they aren’t lovers or exes or bandmates or anything: they’re just the executors of inevitability.

 “I think,” Davey bites, pushing the words out around the overwhelming suction, around the drowning, “you shouldn’t be here.”

Jade struggles to sit up from where she’s sunk in the couch, laptop sliding off her belly. Its tinny alienating melodies muffle where the left speaker is eaten up by the saggy folds of Davey’s couch. “Wait, what happened? This is going well. We both still have pants on and no one’s crying!”

It would be so much easier if Davey could just laugh at Jade’s stupid jokes like she used to.

“I just want you to go home.” Davey can’t fit any other words out of her mouth, doesn’t know how else to say it. She’s tired of this. She’s sick to death.

Jade is off the couch, kneeling in front of her. Jade takes Davey’s hands and rolls them open, unclenching them knuckle by knuckle, extracting Davey’s fingernails from deep within her palms. “Hey, hey,” Jade says in a soft voice while she does it. “These suck, it’s okay. I can write new songs. We’ll find it.” Jade holds one of Davey’s hands, creases spreading red with tiny crescent oases of blood along the lifeline, lifts Davey’s chin from where it’s buried in her chest so they can see each other’s eyes.

“Are you there? Because I’m here,” says Jade. Her eyes are wide, unlined, amber. Davey is shaking and shriveled to her very core. She needs—she needs. Anything she can take in through her skin, anything to nourish her, anything in this moment. Anything, and fast.

“I’m here,” Davey whispers.

Those amber-brown eyes locked to Davey’s brown-black ones, Jade raises Davey’s bleeding palm to her mouth. The look in her eyes is either fearful or reverent. There’s not so much difference, really. Jade’s lips part around her pink tongue. With the lightest of touches, she brushes the tip of her tongue across the cuts on Davey’s palm. Her tongue comes back stained red. Davey feels it, deep and wet and urgent, a swollenness growing at the core of her, an ache between her legs. Jade looks into her eyes and licks her wound and Davey’s cunt throbs to life without any of her brain’s reservations.

Jade licks again. It tickles and stings. Between her legs, Davey can feel her pulse. She feels an entirely different kind of empty, a highly specific _longing to be filled_. She makes a sound between a sigh and a cry, tangled with her breath. Jade slides her hand from Davey’s chin, sweeps down Davey’s throat, draws it between Davey’s breasts with her thumb stretching to catch Davey’s nipple, down Davey’s stomach where all the muscles contract and she moves in spite of herself, pushing flesh against and shivering away from Jade’s touch in a undulating spinal ripple. Then Jade’s hand is between her legs, the tips of her long fingers making small, necessary revolutions that rub the fabric of Davey’s jeans against her clit. Davey’s hips shift gratefully against Jade’s motions and that sound, the sigh-cry, comes out of her mouth again. It’s more insistent now.

Jade’s fingers crook, finding a fuller angle, and Davey’s fingers stumble and scurry to undo the button of her jeans, the zipper. Jade works her hand under Davey, rubbing against Davey’s pussy through her jeans, catches the waistband of Davey’s underwear with her thumb; Davey thrusts against Jade’s hand, gone from below sea level to higher than the fucking moon in the length of a cherry-red tonguestroke. She lifts her hips and Jade slides jeans and panties off her, slides them down below Davey’s knees and so she can kneel between them. Jade stares up at her with that look again, stranded somewhere between adoration and sorrow. Davey breathes the word “please” and doesn’t know what it connects to, what she’d ask for if she could speak.

Jade presses her face between Davey’s legs with enough force and urgency to push her, finally, to sink into this dreadful couch. Jade opens Davey up with her tongue, the same tongue that tasted Davey’s blood, and grips Davey by the hips. Like she knows exactly how hungry Davey is, Jade fills her mouth up with Davey, drowns in and devours her. Jade licks and sucks Davey’s clitoris, at the swollen hot pearl of flesh that feels like it will rupture, like it will spread across all of Davey’s skin in an ecstatic agony of surface tension, the stretched gold burgeoning skin of _almost_ , of _becoming_ , of _about to burst_. Jade sweeps Davey with her tongue, each lapping stroke ending there, there, _there_ , each touch turning Davey’s whole world to carmine while her vision throbs pinker than her fucking heart. Davey doesn’t care what her hips do, doesn’t care what she looks or feels or tastes like, fucks herself with Jade’s mouth as much as Jade’s mouth fucks her, just goes ahead and throws herself away into the sensation, gives herself permission to let go, to motherfucking drown, to be—consumed—

Davey comes with a full-throated cry, one that rings in the air as it leaves her, sounding not desperate but choral, like one of her shouts in their songs. Jade pulls back for breath, letting her forehead sink against Davey’s abdomen, her speeded breath brushing air against the wet, overstimulated skin of Davey’s cunt.

The couch is damp on Davey’s ass, wet even. She thinks distantly about how faux leather won’t stain, not like the real thing, and feels somewhat more kindly towards the horrid thing. Davey leans her head back and stares at her ceiling because it’s easier than looking down at Jade’s head between her legs, resting on her pooched belly, framed by her spreading thighs.

Jade turns her head to bite, ever so gently, the pulse in Davey’s inner thigh. Davey’s whole skeleton locks up in response, her skin blossoming goosebumps. “I fucking miss you,” Jade whispers into Davey’s thigh, saying to veiny cottage-cheese skin what she cannot ever say to Davey’s face for some goddamn reason.

The seal is broken, somehow. Davey’s gotten her voice back from whatever sea witch stole it. She pushes Jade off of her with both hands and stands, without dignity shimmying back into her clothes. She leaves tiny red drops on her jeans from the hand Jade hasn’t licked the blood from. She’s glad of it. It feels, perversely, like proof of love.

Davey stands over Jade, who kneels at her feet and looks utterly broken. The look on her face still can’t decide quite what it is. It’s hovering now somewhere between lust and dislike. Davey feels a bizarre urge to comfort her: there is no danger. When we are together like this, we are only beautiful thieves. We’re only stealing moments. It doesn’t mean I want you to stay.

“The third melody you played,” Davey says. “Can I hear it again? There was an upward progression in the middle—like, dun-un-uhn duh-dun-dun dun-un-uhn—I think I’ve got something for it.”

 

 

III.

Davey remembers the time Jade had a sweaty, feverish, geyser-like flu—remembers greedily kissing her vomit-sour mouth, jealous of all the weight she was losing, desperate to feel anything other than hungry.

The problem isn’t what Davey _doesn’t_ eat. The problem is what she does. The slice after slice of vegan pizza disappearing down her gullet, the faceful of avocado brownies, the handfuls of oily popcorn, the sticky bowls of sorbet—every bite turned to rank, rancid _regret_ once she feels it heavy and inert in her swollen stomach. Even when she’s eating normally, she’s not eating normally.

This is a cognitive problem.

She keeps trying to solve it with behavior. Maybe this would work, for a strong person.

Thinking this way doesn’t make her especially happy. She knows it’s not very healthy. But it feels _clean_ in a way, like pulling off a scab, like the sigh of blood beading in the wake of a razor. (Cutting herself hasn’t helped in so many years, she’s stopped trying.) This is another way of paring down, removing fault and flaw.

Her thesis statement is reduction; she is devoted to the art of making smaller. Her life’s work will be an act of undoing, not creation. She will hollow out a perfect, person-sized negative space: a hole in the world that, once, a woman named Davey might have filled.

That will be her gift to the world. Taking herself out of it.

Today is an eating day. Davey woke up hungry: the gnawing kind, not to be satisfied by the tearing of cuticles, the cutting clench of fists, or the loveless rutting with the first willing stranger she can find. These are all standard solutions, ways of filling herself up again—or ways of punishing herself for wanting to feel full. Depends on how you look at it, she supposes. Probably both. Yes: always both.

None of these solutions work today.

Food doesn’t dull the hunger, either. She tries. It is a dizzy hunger, nauseated and slick, instead of strong as iron while weighing less than ash. It feels like neither courage nor will. Today hunger is an eel, thrashing wetly inside her, clumsy with brine; a fish-skinned, vigorous muscle that rips itself out of her useless hands.

Davey drinks glass after glass of water. She weighs out three ounces of grapes carefully, a sugar-rich indulgence, then eats them all at once in a glutton’s handful. The next handful she doesn’t bother weighing. She’s lucky she doesn’t fucking choke.

After the grapes are gone, she considers that the problem may be protein. She tears open a bag of walnuts, greedy with impatience, and fills her mouth hand over hand, standing in the kitchen. With no rituals to keep her in check, she eats to devour, taking in the sweet oily fat as fast as she can chew it. She has made the fatal mistake of giving herself permission to respond to hunger. Of _allowing_ herself to eat. Her impulses go crazy with the wild head rush of that permission. She’s a child in a candy store. She loses her mind.

She loses control.

Her stomach swells, grows tight. She trades her rigid-waisted jeans for yoga pants. She is _ravenous_. She is made of it.

She keeps eating.

By the time she’s rolling a spoon of peanut butter in vegan chocolate chips with one hand and microwaving frozen spring rolls with the other, it’s pretty obvious to Davey that today is a loss. She tries, she really tries, to hate herself enough to stop eating; but she feels so scraped-out, bottomless. The hate can’t penetrate, doesn’t motivate. Feeling sick, loathing every uncontrollable mouthful, scrabbling one-handed at her sloppy gut to remind herself of the gratuitous flesh there and unable to fucking stop, Davey _eats_.

Her house, like her body, never holds much food. There’s a metaphor there, probably—something about barrenness, starvation, the anesthetized state of her fucking life. Davey’s not that interested in metaphors when she’s not writing. What happens is, she eats all the food in the house by noon.

She tells herself she won’t eat again til tomorrow, the next day; she tells herself this for two and a half hours. Then the compulsive hunger drives her out of her empty-shelved metaphor. Wrapped in a tunic with sleeves so long they cover her hands and the bloat-forgiving yoga pants, bulging like a snake that’s swallowed an egg with nothing to conceal her flubby love handles, she stuffs herself into boots and a beanie and goes out in search of food.

Dressed like a college freshman, Davey slumps on the takeout bench and waits to hear her name. She feels her freshman fifteen-to-thirty clinging around her middle like an inner tube. The presence of fat has a feeling like suction: dragging at her bones, ruining her skin. She can feel it ballooning, warping her tattoos with lipid-yellow stretchmarks. She’s been lying awake nights, trying to press it flat with her hands because the feeling and friction of folding is unbearable.

The worst, she thinks, is when she leans forward, feels it pucker and pinch just beneath her breasts: that space which should be the thinnest, smoothest plain, knobbed with the Zen ripples of her ribcage, as delicate and powder-breakable as hummingbirds or ladies’ wrists. What a specific, hateful place to accumulate adipose. Her breast tissue has always been scarce (even in 2003, when she was a fucking _whale_ ), so hard and miserly you’d think she was smuggling citrus fruit in her bra. She is somewhat outraged that fat is depositing itself just _below_ the only place on her body it might be useful, plastering itself a few inches south in a deliberate affront to the female figure. _Ugly, ugly_. She is the least appealing woman ever to live.

Her stomach growls. She is surprised the sound is not muffled by the layers of corpulence.

Her name is called at last, breaking her out of the one-way thought spiral, at least for a moment or two. She trades some severely folded bills for a brown paper bag of vegan Mexican food and is prepared to slink out of the restaurant and back to her lair of shame when her name is called a second time.

Automatically, Davey orients to the sound. It comes from the dining room. Blond, smiling, and slim as a sylph, Marissa Festa waves at her. “Davey! Over here! Come sit with us!”

It is like a nightmare. Across the table from Marissa, Jade stares at her water glass like she’s trying to evaporate it, like maybe she can make it levitate if she just looks at it hard enough. Whatever she’s attempting, it pretty clearly entails never looking at Davey again. (Who would want to look at Davey, with Marissa right here? Unless, like a rubbernecker, you were drawn in by the crawling thrill of glimpsing horror. Personally Davey feels about a second away from bursting into gore.)

Yet Davey’s feet carry her numbly forward, one foot after another. It is not _like_ a nightmare, it is one. Simile fucking dropped; there is no act of cognitive distancing that will take her out of the reality of Marissa gesturing her into a chair and Davey’s knees bending automatically, Davey’s ponderous ass dropping to the seat with stunned obedience. It’s like it’s all so terrible, so worst-fucking-outcome-imaginable, she can’t stop herself from making it even worse. Leaning into the bad. Seeing where it takes her—how far down the rabbit hole of suffering she can possibly go.

Davey tries to figure out what she’s punishing herself for now. Davey tries to keep her eyes off Jade.

“We’ve only just ordered,” Marissa says brightly, dipping a chip in sloppy salsa and eating it without so much as dripping. “Why don’t you eat with us? I haven’t seen you in ages. You ladies have been so busy writing lately! I think you work too hard.”

So there’s this one problem Davey has with Marissa. One argument she’s had again and again with Jade. Marissa, like the rest of the fucking world, does not know Davey and Jade used to be in love. As far as Marissa and the rest of the world are concerned, the best and most important part of Davey’s entire thirty-four years of life didn’t even happen, doesn’t even exist.

“She probably needs to get her food home, babe,” Jade chokes out. So she _can_ speak. Davey watches her closely. She still won’t look. “To—um—whoever she ordered it with.”

Why won’t Jade look at her? Three days ago Jade was so deep inside Davey, she could probably taste Davey’s fate, like the cunnilinguist oracle of Delphi. Is it regret? They have done so many regrettable things to each other. Is it worse if it’s shame? Jade is the most ashamed person Davey has ever met. Davey never wanted to be one of the things she was ashamed of. But god, it’s easy to imagine being ashamed of Davey.

Suddenly, Davey knows that nothing will make her feel better than causing Jade as much discomfort as possible. If she’s too disgusting to look at, _fine_. She can be disgusting. The why and the who of her punishing clarifies.

“Oh, no,” Davey says, dropping her takeout bag on the table so heavily their silverware shakes. “This food is all for me.”

She watches the side of Jade’s face closely, hoping Jade is replaying every comment she has ever made to Davey about what she was or was not eating, about the dimensions implied by and exact connotations of the phrase ‘that Italian ass.’

Feeling huge, rude, unruly, perverse—these are not new feelings. But right now Davey feels like an ogre in a way that is delicious and powerful, and that _is_ new. She pops the staples on her takeout bag, pulls out a greasy chimichanga, peels back the oil-stained wrapped, and crams as much fried dough into her mouth as she can take. She bites savagely, showering the table with crispy flakes of shell and roasted black beans and pico de gallo.

She stares right at Jade and declares, mouth full, “S’good. _Great._ Should’ve ordered a fifth one.”

Jade still will not look at her, but Marissa will. Twenty-two years old, Marissa is gawking like she’s never seen an elder attack a fried Mexican cylinder before. It occurs to Davey, chewing with violence, that she has never actually eaten in front of Marissa before. She has taken especial pains to avoid it. There was one memorable band dinner at a nice farm-to-table restaurant, early into Jade’s courtship of Marissa, an indecently short time since their break-up, during which Davey consumed nothing but cup after cup of black coffee, insisting to anyone who would listen that she was _fine_. She feels a small thrill in her guts now, remembering everyone’s obnoxiously persistent concern, remembering how good everything smelled and how her mouth watered as she did not give in, as she ate _nothing_.

She is proud of this accomplishment now: that Marissa has never seen her eat. That this grotesque moment, this object fucking lesson, is the first time. Davey gulps down most of her mouthful, takes another huge bite, holds Marissa’s gaze without flinching.

Marissa, possessed of functioning eyeballs, has probably deduced that something is going on—based less on Davey’s table manners than Jade’s paralyzing awkwardness. (Jade is currently trying very, very hard to spin a tortilla chip on its edge. This task evidently requires her total concentration.) Surely Marissa is familiar with Jade behaving awkwardly by now, but she probably doesn’t expect it in relation to Best Friend and Bandmate of a Decade Davey Havok.

Bless her thin blond heart, though: Marissa loads a chip with queso and vanishes it into her mouth, compromising neither the tabletop nor her lipstick. “I can’t wait for my fajitas,” she says. Her stamina for food-related small talk is commendable, really. “So how’s the album going, Davey? Jade is being very, like, Illuminati about it.”

She is working so hard to be kind, to excuse and compensate for everyone else’s behavior with her sunny disposition. Davey can’t decide who at this table she hates the most.

_Actually, Marissa, it’s the strangest thing. Every time we sit down to write we just end up fucking each other til we’re split open and exhausted._

The chimichanga turns to sawdust in Davey’s mouth. She feels the grease slicking her palms, feels the puffy weight of all she’s consumed today stretching and compressing her organs. The furious hunger is sated all at once. She forces herself to swallow, choking a little on rubbery peppers and slimy onions.  The problem of appetite is solved; the binge is over. Maybe if Davey pasted a picture of Marissa to her fridge, she’d never lose control like this again.

What Davey wants now is to undo it. Cut open her belly and scoop the pressure out, prostrate herself before the Porcelain Madonna and heave until she’s truly holy, until all that’s left of her is thin yellow bile.

The itch is urgent: it cannot wait. What she’s eaten breaks down further, becomes less reversible, with each shudder of her heart. Her gut guzzles calories, converts them to thick white fat. If she’s going to get it out of herself, she must act fast.

With great care, Davey lays her ravaged chimichanga to rest on the table. Jade watches her hands, her chipped fingernails, the oily rainbow sheen of her fingertips. Davey cannot begin to speculate what Jade fucking Puget is thinking, what Davey’s shining fingers put her in mind of. Davey realizes that, if she is to vomit, she cannot bear for Jade to know it.

Jade is already here on this date with this beautiful woman, while Davey is fat and alone, wolfing down takeout Tex Mex in yoga pants that have not been laundered in some time. Jade is already so thin Davey gets papercuts when she touches her, which is too often and not nearly enough at once. Jade has already broken up with Davey and moved on. Jade is already _winning_ , in other words. If Jade knows Davey has to vomit up her lunch, too, she’ll have fucking won. Skip the victory lap and just fucking brain Davey with the big gold trophy; start the closing ceremony, the games are done.

Nauseous with self-loathing and Jade not even able to look at her, Davey wonders if she even wants to be playing this game. She is on a ride from which she does not know how to get off. For the first time since they broke up, Davey considers that if she knew what the exit looked like, someday maybe she _could_ get off.

“Thank you for asking me to join you, Marissa,” Davey says, hating the sound of her own voice, the syrupy insincerity of it. “Always wonderful to spend quality time with you, Jade,” she adds, and this time makes no effort to hold back the bite.

“Oh—are you going already? We’d love you to stay,” Marissa says. She doesn’t quite sound like she means it. When she thinks Davey’s not looking, she keeps shooting glares at Jade. Davey hopes they argue about this moment. She hopes they eat her bitterness along with their food.

“I really must. There’s a—thing,” says Davey. It is true at the same time as it’s a lie. God, the food: the only thing more painful than taking her big bag of unwanted food would be leaving it on this table. Gingerly, she hefts the bag. It really is heavy. It really is large. Like Davey, it is bloated with shame.

She holds the bag in front of her abdomen as if it’s that easy to disguise her distended gut, as if an eclipse is enough to conceal that volume of bulging tunic. She hunches a bit, curling over her belly, over the bag, in fear of how the flesh will protrude if she straightens. She can feel her love handles creasing into terrible rolls. No one ever talks about how _uncomfortable_ it is, being fat. She is a hunchbacked crone, protecting her greasy bounty like it is in jeopardy of poaching by other diners. With perfect clarity, Davey thinks, _I want to die._

She scuttles out of the restaurant over Marissa’s protests, which in spite of themselves hold notes of relief. She almost thinks she hears Jade start to speak, but she cannot afford to slow her momentum. Jade had plenty of opportunity to speak, if she had something she wanted to say. Crablike, Davey makes her way to the garbage cans around the corner of the Mexican place. She lets go of her heavy bag like it’s ballast, leans over the edge of the can, opens her gut, and empties herself.

 

IV.

Maybe it’s that the details, the sheer volume of paperwork required for the dissolution of a relationship, got away from her at some point.  Maybe it’s that Davey doesn’t believe Jade will really leave (even though she has), that Jade won’t capitulate and return to her (even though she hasn’t)— why waste energy tying up loose ends she’s just going to pick at until they unravel again?

Whatever the reason, when Davey passes out on the treadmill, Jade is still her emergency contact. Jade is the one they call.

When Davey comes to, the world swims sluggishly around her, running at a delay. She’s bleeding from her forehead; the skin stings, split in the wet kiss of a minor laceration. Davey is dry-mouthed, trembly, nauseous, and she’s torn between her desire to throw up and her desire to appear healthy and fine so this doesn’t become A Thing. As it is, gym staff hover over her, debating excitedly whether they will call an ambulance.

“Don’t call anyone,” Davey says, alerting them of her return to consciousness. She was out for a few seconds, tops. The constant endorphins these thin, muscular individuals pump themselves with make them prone to overreacting. Personal trainers are the last people you want on hand in an emergency. They will call a fire truck every fucking time.

“There was an autopsy on CSI. On the TV. It was gory and I must have fainted,” Davey explains in the most soothing voice she can muster. It is a well-rehearsed lie. It is paramount that 911 not be dialed. The last thing in the world that Davey Havok needs is to be put in a paper gown and stuck on a scale. The second to last thing she needs? A conversation with an emergency doc about her _weight_.

“We’ve already called your emergency contact,” says one of the trainers.

“Fuck.” Davey was wrong, a second ago. _This_ is the first, second, and third last thing she fucking needs.

Cool cloth pressed to her forehead, band-aid and bangs swept to obscure the tiny wound, Davey grudgingly sips a Powerade the trainers pushed on her. It is orange-flavored compromise: 40 calories per 8 ounces or they call an ambulance. Davey swallows orange scowling and calls Jade to tell her not to come.

Jade doesn’t pick up.

Davey’s walking on the treadmill when Jade arrives. She’d wanted to be running, to look as healthy and robust as possible while Britney urges _work, bitch_ in her earbuds, but the staff have forbidden it. In the words of the shift supervisor: “The more you insist on running with a head injury, the more you convince me you’ve got a concussion and medical attention is needed.”

So Davey is walking (and planning to join a new gym _posthaste_ , no matter how convenient this one is to her apartment) when Jade gets there. There’s a split second of frantic concern on her face; it yields swiftly to annoyance when she spots Davey, pink-cheeked and hale, arms pumping and grim determination on her face. It’s hard to say whether the concern or the annoyance pleases Davey more.

Jade stomps over to the treadmill with a _look_ that could yet resolve into several different emotions on her face, her arms crossed over her chest. She’s looking thin, of course, and stylish in her usual uniform: tight black jeans, fitted black band tee, black sneakers, black bracelets, designer sunglasses pushed up her forehead, scarf in a French loops at her neck, white belt barely held up by the slimness of her hips.

“You can just call me,” Jade says shortly. Her face is pinched with the effort of mitigating whatever facial expression she wants to be making. “If you want to see me. The theatrics are _beyond_ unnecessary. They actually kind of make me hate you.”

Pinpoints of sweat, or virtue, tingle on Davey’s face. Jade is more than capable of looking at her now, she notes. Davey musters the most scornful expression she can. “I don’t want to see you.”

“So when your gym called me and told me it was a _health emergency_ , that was, what? A cleverly coded message to fuck off?”

“I asked them not to.” Davey hears herself sounding rather more petulant than she’d intended. She’d been going for self-righteous. This is an unfavorable shift, a loss of ground. She hates, _hates_ losing control. Her eyes flick to the treadmill display, the talisman of calories burned, for comfort. But she’s only been walking: the number there, under 100, is another punch in the gut. Suddenly reaching her daily deficit goal is another thing out of her control. Her heart twists. She begins breathing much harder than her physical expenditure requires.

Jade, well-practiced in this exact bullshit, tracks the flick of Davey’s gaze. Her faces clouds over. She reaches up and shoves Davey’s forward-flopped hair off her forehead, revealing the blood-dotted band-aid. “You fell,” she says, not like an accusation but like a fact.

This has happened once before, when they were still together in a more meaningful way than they are together now. Jade had been terrified, haunted by visions of brain tumors, unable to let go of the chilling vision of Davey passing out one day in the streets of Oakland, discovered by the driver of the car that ran over her collapsed form. There had been an explosive fight over that one, with Davey refusing to see a neurologist and Jade, face ruined by tears, yelling, _Does it not matter that I’m worried about you? Don’t you care about what I love?_

Davey had known better than to say out loud _I care about being thin more._

“It was hardly an emergency,” Davey snips now, jerking her bangs back down. “You’re overreacting.”

Jade grabs her own forehead in exasperation. “Do you fucking hear yourself? I did not create this situation, Davey! I was having _lunch_ with my _girlfriend_ —”

“So why the fuck did you come?” Davey’s voice has climbed. People on the surrounding treadmills are no longer pretending not to eavesdrop. Some might describe her tone as _shouting_. Is eating all they fucking ever do, these fucking hollow-boned lovebirds? It makes her _sick_. “If you’re so much better off without me!”

“You’re right, that’s a totally fair and accurate interpretation of the words coming out of my mouth,” Jade fires back. Her voice brims with disgust. “I obviously dropped everything and drove across the bridge when I heard you were hurt because I don’t care about you at all.”

Davey punches the emergency stop on her treadmill and digs the heels of her hands into her eyes. This is all getting the fuck away from her. This isn’t how she wanted this to go. None of this is what she wanted.

“We are officially such disasters we can’t even have a conversation anymore,” she says. It’s the first honest thing out of her mouth all day. She glances sideways at Jade, who begins to laugh.

Davey steps off the treadmill and Jade puts a hand on her shoulder. The touch should be thrilling or loathly or _something_ , but all Davey feels is—grounded. Cared for.

“Really, Vee, are you okay?” Jade asks. Her voice is remade, all mistrust and guarded sarcasm and accusation dropped out of it. It’s just her regular talking to Davey voice, now: slightly dorky, warm, always with the edge of a joke in it, touched by the accent Jade was always so embarrassed of.

Somewhere within Davey, an insidious voice suggests, _If you get Jade to fuck you in the locker room, that will make up for not being able to run._ Sweaty, shaky, and sour-mouthed, Davey surveys Jade, and for the first time Davey does not wish to self-destruct.

“Yeah, I really am,” she says, instead of any of the corrosive lies and seductions that clutter her mouth like too many teeth. “Thank you for coming out and making sure.”

Jade walks Davey to her car. They don’t yell anything at each other. Davey doesn’t try to fuck her or make her feel guilty or make her cry. Davey doesn’t even try to stop her from going back to whatever cute bistro she left Marissa in, reassembling the pieces of her afternoon. Davey doesn’t know why today is different, why today she is able to just—let go. Without exploding it all, or imploding herself, or enacting whatever dramatic display of self-harm necessary to make things worse. Without _needing_ things to be worse just because that feels better than things being okay.

Locked in her car in the parking lot, Davey waits until Jade has driven away before she even starts to cry.

She doesn’t know why. God, god. There isn’t a thing anymore she understands.

 

There are boxes in Jade’s apartment. Davey can just see the edge of them from where she sits: a thick sheaf of flat cardboard leaning in the hall, ready to be reshaped into vessels. Vessels for _what_ , is what Davey wants to know. Maybe Marissa’s moving out. Maybe Jade is going to box up and put away everything in the apartment that reminds her of Davey.

Discreetly, Davey pinches at her forearm flab. She imagines herself as only bones, collapsible. Jade would fold her into a box and tape it shut, sealing Davey into darkness. Davey would have no tongue with which to protest, no vocal cords with which to scream. Jade would lift the box easily, all of Davey’s physical and psychological excess stripped away at last, and shove the box into the farthest corner of the deepest closet and stack her comic books and Christmas tree on top.

With Davey buried, maybe they both would forget. With Davey only bones, maybe they both could have a version of healing.

But they both know Davey could never vanish quietly. She is too big, too loud. She needs too much. Even her skeleton would claw at Jade, drag runnels and rents into Jade’s pale flesh with piercing fingerbones. Bruises in the shape of metacarpals would bloom blue around Jade’s neck, gallows jewelry. Davey would put her to death.

So there’s one way, at least, they could end up together.

Davey is having a kind of weird day. She is curled around a notebook on Jade’s living room floor, pulling tiny strips of paper out of the wire binding. She scatters them to the carpet around her. They look like lost teeth.

Today she is weary of the slow-motion panic attack that has comprised her last three years. Today the idea that all she and Jade can offer each other is pain and mutual destruction doesn’t feel romantic, it feels fucking exhausting. She doesn’t want to do it anymore. Hating herself, hating Jade so much—it is all too heavy. The weight of it presses Davey into the floor, a fiercer gravity. Her bones are brittle, her heart drowned beyond revival.

She wants to stop.

_Kill yourself,_ a voice in her brain suggests. Even this is so tiresomely familiar. So played out.

“Boxes,” Davey says with a sigh. She doesn’t have the energy to make it a question.

Jade, standing over her with an acoustic guitar, looks up at Davey as if from a great distance. She had been lost in what she was playing. Davey feels something dull and bitter, not unlike jealousy, that music is a place Jade can still vanish into. Davey is much too fat and full of venom to vanish into anything. The whole world is made of people and things that will not hold her.

“Um,” says Jade. Her cheeks flare pink beneath the freckles. “Yes. Boxes.”  The steady current of background music spilling out between her fingers dries up into abrupt silence. “I was gonna—well. Shit. We’re sort of moving to LA.”

“We?”

Davey’s brain, sluggish from calorie restriction, clicks and whirs and does not process. They live in Oakland, they always have. The Bay is their home. Davey’s not _moving_.

But Jade doesn’t mean the two of them. Of course she doesn’t. Jade doesn’t think of them like that anymore. Just because one has meant the other since 199-fucking-8 doesn’t mean they’re a unit now. Fate has clearly declined to yoke them together. They both possess exquisite freedom of movement.

And now Jade is so desperate to get away from her, she’ll put 400 miles between them.

Breaking up with Davey wasn’t enough. Jade feels the need to run from her, too. Will Los Angeles be south enough, or will Jade be immigrating to fucking Mexico soon? For a while now Davey has felt like a grotesque and rusty bear trap. But somehow she never expected Jade would chew off her own arm to be free.

Davey had no idea Jade even wanted to be free.

“Makes sense,” Davey hears herself saying. “The first time you didn’t leave me hard enough. Fuck my heart and I hang around asking for more.” Davey laughs, which is maybe meant to sound breezy but comes out more like a sob. “God, you must hate me.”

“Hate you?” Jade echoes. Davey can’t stop staring at her own hands, working faster and faster to shred the notebook into a snowdrift of unwritten words.

Davey’s view of her hands is obscured by her own tears. Then Jade is before her, pulling Davey’s hands into her own, ducking her head to catch Davey’s gaze with insufferable pity.

“Davey. Baby. I couldn’t—I’ve never hated you.”

“Isn’t that why you left me? You didn’t _want_ me anymore.” Fuck. Davey _is_ crying now. Tears hit her hands where they’re slipped inside Jade’s. Davey feels like she’s swallowed a hurricane. Whatever’s inside her rips apart her throat, rages against her ribs. She will be destroyed from the inside. She wonders how she will even tell the difference.

“It’s not _you_ that I didn’t want. It was never that I didn’t want _you._ ” Jade’s voice is quiet. Davey was wrong about her eyes—it’s not pity. It’s sorrow.

They have never talked about this before.

“Then WHY?” The word erupts out of Davey, a gust from the internal hurricane. She tears her hands out of Jade’s grasp with violence, hating herself for ever finding comfort there. “Why couldn’t we have it? We were _happy_ , we could be—we are so _good_ together. We are so shitty apart. You’re the only thing in my whole life that has even made sense. We built something sacred, Jade. Why the fuck did you burn it all down, if you wanted me? I was _yours_!”

“It wasn’t you I didn’t want. It was—the glitter.”

Jade’s words are so outrageous Davey forgets to be outraged. She just stares at Jade. She repeats flatly, “You broke up with me because you don’t like glitter.”

“No—yes. I mean.” Jade stands up so she can pace in these tight, tortured circles. She flops her hands around in anxious awkwardness. Davey feels outside of herself, strangely cool and calm as she weeps on Jade’s living room floor and Jade dances a hora of agitation. “You can be… with the glitter and the photoshoots and the, you know, make-up. With the food, and the moods, and I know it’s not your fault you’re sick, but—it’s a _lot_ , Vee. You’re a _lot_ sometimes. I can’t always be—I mean, I couldn’t. I wasn’t. I wasn’t enough and we both know it.”

Davey makes a sound of protest but Jade just speaks over her. “We weren’t _happy_ , we were a train wreck, same as we are now, only—only the stakes were so much higher, weren’t they, because it was supposed to be the band and the rest of our lives and everyone was watching. So yeah. It was the glitter. It was the Vagaries of Fame. There are— _limits_ to what I want my family, god, and everyone to read in the tabloids about me. I’m not brave, I’m not prepared to be a gay icon or Lady Bowie or wear PVC pants or _any_ of it.”

 Jade is breathing so hard Davey can almost hear her ribs rattle. “That’s why. It was too much, and I was not fucking enough. I couldn’t deal with it all. So I left.”

“ _I_ was happy,” Davey says. It is a stupid, childish thing to cling to, to hang herself on the refutation of that one splinter of an argument. But she doesn’t know how to respond to the rest. _Glitter_? She doesn’t know what the fuck to do about _glitter_. She’s just—whatever she is. And now that’s _a lot_? Why is Jade still hanging around, if Davey is too fucking much to deal with?

It turns out this one tiny protest was the exact right one. Jade whirls on her, face twisted with frustration and anger. “That is a fucking _lie_!” she cries. “You are _covered_ in goddamn scars I couldn’t stop you from making. You sang through so much pain you almost ruined your voice forever. You used to play chicken with the numbers on the bathroom scale, fasting for days. I didn’t _imagine_ this, Davey. I was there, I _watched_ you. Do you get—can you possibly imagine what it’s like, having the woman you love try to kill herself under your loving fucking touch? That’s not _happy_ , that’s not sacred or gold. It’s fucking poison.”

“I have _never_ tried to kill myself.” She can’t stop protesting. She has the sense she is not objecting to the right things, but she feels so lost, so outside of all this. Jade is describing someone else’s relationship. It was the happiest Davey has ever been, the best part of her life. She doesn’t remember it how Jade’s describing it. She _can’t_.

It is so, so important that Davey was happy and well when Jade was with her, and she is helpless and she is freezing now because Jade is not.

Jade drops to her knees and seizes Davey roughly by the wrists. Her hands are ludicrously large, ringing them with inches to spare like a watch band made for a gorilla. Davey’s wrists are not small; it’s Jade’s hands. They must be huge. Colossal, even. “ _Then what the fuck is this_ ,” Jade demands. “You think this isn’t _killing yourself_?”

Davey’s lips part. From her mouth, she hears the syllable “Oh.” She is very far away inside her head, her blood thrumming through her ears like the crashing sea. That voice, the one that’s always saying _starve yourself_. And the voice that says _kill yourself_. They sound the same. They sound the same because they are the same. They’re the same voice. They want the same thing.

It is a simple thing. It should have been obvious, maybe. It is apparently obvious to everyone else.

But she really has never realized it before. The voice that tells her not to eat, its goal isn’t that she be skinny. Its goal isn’t that she be pretty and light and carefree. Its goal is not for her to look good in tight pants under the stage lights, for her to like herself when she looks in the mirror, for her to be sexy enough to attract Jade or anyone else. Its goal is not her fucking _happiness_.

All that voice wants is for her to die.

“Oh,” she says again. What else is there to say? This is why. This is why Jade left her.

Jade left her because even when they were happy, they weren’t happy.

Oh.

The tears are coming down her face thickly now, in great salty sheets, but actually Davey’s chest and throat aren’t hitched with crying. The tears are just a byproduct of finally relieving the pressure she’s held in so long. She feels good, almost. At least by comparison.

Sensing the shift—they’ve been doing this a long time—Jade sits down on the carpet beside her, disrupting her careful blizzard of discarded paper teeth. The yelling is over. The fighting is done. Everybody on the battlefield is dead. The white flag is stained with red. Jade puts an arm around her shoulders; Davey leans against her. They sit like this until Davey’s hoodie is drenched and the tears have stopped.

Eventually, Davey says, “If you move to LA, we’ll finally have to stop.”

“That’s kind of the point, Vee.” Jade presses a quick, illicit kiss to Davey’s temple. “I’m happy with her. With Marissa. I’m gonna fuck that up if I can’t untangle myself from you.”

“I’m bad for you.” Davey laughs a little, saying it. It feels preposterous. She feels lighter than air. She feels like she could simply float away from this conversation, away from this earth, float up and up and up until she was a star, or nothing.

Jade laughs too. “Yeah, I guess you are.”

“So we’re not—we’re not going to fix this. You and me.”

“I don’t know. Not right now. Maybe never.”

“Oh,” Davey says again. She’s taking in so much new information today. She wonders how long this particular information has been screaming at her, without her ever wanting to hear it. She looks at Jade, wipes some of the water from her cheeks. “I’m not really okay with that.”

“Me neither,” says Jade. She has the grace to look miserable. “But I can’t. I can’t be with you, with this version of you. I am not healthy enough to make both of us well. I’m sorry I’m not.”

Davey groans, buries her face in Jade’s shoulder. “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” she says, “but I almost want whatever’s best for you. I almost want it more than I want you to fucking suffer.”

“Careful! You’re sounding like a flexible, mature adult,” Jade remarks. She pulls amusement into her voice, a sort of masquerade for the sadness. It makes them both feel better, to sit next to this train wreck and make glib little jokes, instead of crawling back inside the twisted, smoking wreckage and poking themselves in their own open wounds. “I didn’t think I’d live to see the day.”

“Yeah, well, you probably won’t. I’m going to plant a pipe bomb in here tomorrow. And under no fucking circumstances will I help you move. Don’t even ask.” Discreetly, Davey tries to soak Jade in through her skin. She can’t imagine a life without Jade right here, beside her. She can’t imagine a life without this particular pain. She says, “Maybe you can’t be brave enough, but I can’t—I can’t be _okay_ about it. I can’t be normal about you. I’m not your friend. I haven’t ever been.”

Jade looks at her in surprise and Davey stares levelly back. “I am always going to be the girl who’s obsessively, destructively, miserably in love with you. That’s always who I’ve been. It’s not changing. I’m not.”

“And I’m the girl who’s always been frightened by that,” says Jade. Her voice is soft. Her words are true. “I’m always going to be the girl who gets stuck between running towards you and running away.”

With it laid out so clearly, there’s not much else to say. They sit in dysphoric, comfortable silence until it’s broken by a tortured growl from Davey’s stomach.

“All of these emotions are exhausting. I’m really fucking hungry. Actually, I’m really fucking tired of being really fucking hungry,” Davey confesses. It’s different, being honest about this. Saying it out loud. Saying it to Jade, when before they’ve only ever been able to scream about it.

“Do you want to eat? We could get lunch,” Jade offers. Her voice is almost casual. It is only because Davey knows her so well that she hears the catch, the tell. Jade feels the preponderance of this moment. They both know how important it is. How fragile. How new. _Do you want to eat_. Davey hasn’t been able to answer that question in years.

“I think I do,” says Davey. It feels like the first, smallest step away from death, towards life. This is an uncharted new direction.

It’s a small thing, maybe. But Davey knows better than anyone the weight and meaning bound up in small things.

 

 

_end_


End file.
